Sino-french International associated laboratory

Doing fieldwork and crossed practices in Post-Western Sociology (2)

2016 September 19, 20, 21th CASS

Argumentary

With the creation of the LIA Post-Western Sociologies in France and in China, in the Chinese Opening Conference in 2013 November on the 9th and 10th at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and in the French Opening Conference on French and Chinese experiences at the ENS of Lyon in 2014 January on the 23th and 24th we already began to identify Post-Western Sociology. In the Conference at Beijing University in 2014 Oktober the 17th and 18th The fabric sociological knowledge drawing on French and Chinese experiences, in the Conference Metropolis, Urban Governance and Citizenship in China and in Europe on November 28, 29 at Shanghai University, and in the Conference Doing Post-Western Sociology June 2015 24th, 25th, 26th at ENS of Lyon, we analyzed how a post-Western space has come into being in which sociological knowledge is emerging that is both specific and shared and in which theoretical methodologies are gathered on the basis of very different histories and traditions.

After the Workshop Doing fieldwork and crossed practices in Post-Western Sociology (1) 2016 July the, 18, 19, 20 at ENS Lyon (1) in this Workshop Doing fieldwork and crossed practices in Post-Western Sociology (2) we will examine how research practices and sociological knowledge are constructed by analyzing the similar and different forms of field experience in Chinese and French sociology. P. Bourdieu (2001) wrote: "Practice is always under-estimated and under-analysed, so to understand it, a lot of theoretical competency must be engaged; paradoxically, a lot more than to understand a theory. It is necessary to avoid reducing practices to the idea that we have when we do not have any experience other than logic."

Arrangements and disjunctions between different places of knowledge production are constructed through scientific fieldwork and sociological methods. Here, this raises the issue of the development of sociological knowledge in a Post-Western conceptual space. It is thus necessary to show the similarities of uses of sociological methods in Europe - especially in France - and in China, which reveal active constructions in the circulation of knowledge. Nowadays methodological cosmopolitanism is the choice which emerges as the most satisfying solution. This entails the implementation of multi-sited and contextualized tools to account for assemblages and disjunctions between the particular narratives of specific societies which are all legitimate and it involves describing what Ulf Hannerz has called a “continuum creolisation” or what Michaël Burawoy has termed a global ethnography.